Do’s and Don’ts of Text in InDesign
I was recently discussing the difference between “rules” and “laws” with my two young sons. It’s a tricky business, but while breaking a law will get you in trouble with the police, breaking a rule makes me say, “Hey, don’t make me want to come over there and whop you upside the head!”*
There are rules to everything, including working in InDesign, but I keep finding people who either don’t know the rules or can’t be bothered to put them into practice in their own lives. For example, hasn’t everyone on the planet heard by now that:
Don’t type two spaces after a period, colon, or any other punctuation unless you really want something to look like it came from a typewriter from the mid-20th century.
I mean, really. Robin Williams (who wrote The Mac is not a typewriter and The PC is not a typewriter) and I were teaching that almost 20 years ago!
Here’s another rule that, when broken, drives me bonkers:
Don’t apply a character style to an entire paragraph.
Sure, maybe there’s a few rare reasons you’d want to do this, but I can’t think of a single reason you’d ever need to. If you want to affect the look of a paragraph, apply a paragraph style. Character styles should be reserved for little bits of formatting, such as italic, bold, changing the font for a URL or something like that.
Whatever you do, don’t don’t don’t create a “bodytext” paragraph style and a “bodytext” character style and apply both to all your body text. I don’t know why people do this, but I have seen it far too often! Please stop.
There are dozens of these kinds of rules, but only a few more come to mind:
- Don’t type one or more empty paragraph returns between paragraphs to make space. If you want to make space, use Space Before or Space After, or use Keep With. That’s what those features are there for.
- Do use paragraph styles for every paragraph in your document unless you’re doing a little one-page ad. And two corollaries: Don’t use the Basic Paragraph Style if you can avoid it, and don’t base other paragraph styles on Basic Paragraph Style if you can avoid it. You will only get yourself in trouble, especially if you ever have to copy your text from one document into another.
- Don’t press Tab, Tab, Tab to place the text halfway across the page. Instead, type tab once and place a tab stop where you want the text to land.
- Don’t type in ALL CAPS! If you really need something to be in capital letters, apply the All Caps style to that text (so you can turn it off later when you come to your senses).
I can’t think of anymore right now. (Not because no more will come to mind, but rather because if I keep thinking about this I’m just going to get too upset.) But feel free to add your own “Text Rules” below!
*In case you were worrying: No, I’m anti-violence and I’ve never actually said this or done this to my children. But to you… well, I might make an exception for you, especially on that applying character styles to a whole story thing…
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Don’t make lots and lots of text frames when you are trying to put headlines and subheads above a paragraph of text. Make one text frame and use space after and indents to keep everything organized and pretty. (one page ads excluded again).
And especially don’t format script fonts in all caps!
Don’t use soft returns…use no break instead to keep words/characters together
Don’t use tabs to move text to the next line, use a soft or hard return.
Do learn the proper usage for hypens, en & em dashes.
Do learn the difference between uppercase & lowercase numbers.
Don’t skew or stretch your type.
Don’t create bullet or numbered lists by hitting the space key 5 times in front of the bullet or number, 5 more times after the bullet or number, a dozen tabs to force a new line, and then a dozen spaces to get that next line to line up with the first line… Even Quark allows more elegant ways to create lists.
All these remind me of when I was learning Quark Xpress, I was taught by an old compositor that was strict on type. Although he often used carriage returns to make a space and etc. It was his school of thought from the old day, to add a bit of lead to the text to space it out and all that.
After he finished teaching me how to type correctly I then taught him all about Space Before and Space After, how to insert an En Space and an Em Space and all that. But my word he was the man for tabbing and here’s a tip for all that I have never forgotten.
Stick to the math and you will never go wrong. What I mean by this is, if you’re going to justify each page to the basline grid, do work out the type size + the leading and make your measure accordingly. Do work out your average words per line, plan your page properly. That way you won’t end up with pages that finish up and down on the page. If you know the average amount of words per page, then you know how many pages of text you are going to have.
If you know how many pages you have you know what your spine width is going to be, say if it’s 120 pages on 90gsm matt, then your spine width is going to be 5.4 mm, or if it’s gloss it will be 4.32 mm.
So, do work out your pages and plan them, don’t just willy nilly them and hope for the best.
Do the math and you will never ever go wrong.
Oh and another classic “don’t”, when setting numbered paragraphs don’t put a “white” number in to align the numbers to the right, CS3 has the cool feature to align your numbers for you, but the old old old way of doing this was to use a right tab and align your numbers correctly without the use of a “white” number.
Oh and please don’t try to make the pages run as printer pairs, readers pairs please.
Please do get your bullets correct. Use one type of bullets for level 1 bullets, another for bullets that are indented from a bullet and so on.
A quote inside a quote should be single quotation marks. “This is a quote, ‘this is a quote in single quotation marks’, and so on …”
On that note, elipses people, I can’t stress that enough, three dots is not an elipse.
Proper quotation marks too, not inch marks.
If you stop at a red light at a pedestrian crossing yet there is no one there, drive through it. :)
Do not wear black socks (or any socks at all) with sandals.
Sam and Fritz, LOL. I think both of those fall into the category of breaking the law, though.
* Use bullets and numbering, do not insert bullets or number things manually.
* Don’t create master pages for every section of your document (unless you have a really good reason to do so). Use the section settings from the pages panel and then use a section marker character.
* Don’t set a wrong language in the paragraph style settings or your hyphenation will be all messed up. Only use the single line paragraph composer if you know what you are doing.
* Do not manually adust tracking (or even kerning) to copyfit a story and say “Hey, nobody’s gonna notice?”
* Do not add a big black drop shadow to black 10pt body copy (or use a white drop shadow to make text “readable” because you placed it on top of a really contrasty image)
* Do use the leader field in the Tabs panel (or the paragraph style settings) instead of typing thousands of period characters.
* Don’t press return at the end of every line in MS Word. E-Mail programs do that automatically as soon as you send text. Notepad on windows tends to do that as well when you save a text.
Not strictly text related, but annoying anyway:
* Do not put a white rectangle over an image and set its blend mode to “Color” to save a trip to Photoshop to convert the image to grayscale.
* Do not rename, delete, or move files that are part of an InCopy workflow from within Finder/Windows Explorer/the file browser dialog box.
* Don’t embed the images and delete the originals if you prepare a text in MS Word
* Do not use the Align panel as a substitute for guides. And never align things by eye.
Eugene: You don’t necessarily have to work out the baseline grid settings yourself (surprisingly, there are quite a few people who actually don’t know how to do it), you could always go into a text frame with your body copy paragraph style applied, set leading to Auto, and then just read out the value and type it into the baseline grid settings.
About that all caps thing? Is there a setting somewhere for “all lowercase”? It’s quite annoying with languages where more than just the first word of a sentence start with capital letters?
Well, if you want to go that far off topic….never ever put pastrami on anything but rye bread and never ever add anything but mustard.
Eugene Tyson said:
A quote inside a quote should be single quotation marks. ?This is a quote, ?this is a quote in single quotation marks?, and so on ??
Yes and no. That goes for American English. The exact opposite goes for British English. (The world is bigger than America, amazingly . . . )
Peter wrote: “Do not manually adust tracking (or even kerning) to copyfit a story and say ‘Hey, nobody?s gonna notice?’ ”
While I agree that this is overused, I think I’d reword it as: “People notice kerning and tracking in smaller increments than you’d expect” and “Don’t apply tracking to a single word or sentence unless you’re very careful.
I have no problem with doing some kerning/tracking for copyfitting (in some ways, that’s what the H&J settings and Teacup’s TypeFitter plug-in are all about.) But one must be careful.
The other rule I question, Peter, is not to use the Align panel in place of guides. Can you explain why you find this annoying? I personally tend the other way, finding myself frustrated when people add guides all over their pages when they could just use the Align features faster.
I’m with you on the guides, David. I try to use as few as possible but when I do used them, I think snapping a guide to an object is one the great underutilized features of ID.
Buy a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style and The Elements of Typographic Design. When in doubt consult them.
They’re not always in agreement (see “em-dashes”), but they’re the best and most often used books on my desk(s).
Thanks Klaus, I realise different types of English have different rule sets, I suppose I could have worded it to say, use different types of quotation marks when quoting inside a quote, i.e., if you’re using double quotation marks, then use single quotation marks inside of these.
My rule is controversial in the U.S.: ?The only thing that goes in quotation marks is the quoted text.?. Specifically, punctuation for the sentence does not go into the quotation marks. As a programmer, the U.S. convention upsets me.
Five is absolutely correct. Chicago Manual even gives you the rule regarding page numbering.
That brings me to my contribution to the rule list ? never print only a number on a page.
Five, far more enjoyable than CMOS is Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynn Truss. Truly a fun read on grammar!
Ashley, I understand that putting punctuation inside quotation marks isn’t logical, but there is so much about English (and especially American English!) that is illogical… but rules is rules!
(And of course, every rule is meant to be broken on occasion if necessary. All things in moderation, including moderation.)
Don’t forget that rules are meant to be broken.
Why not use Basic Paragraph to set all the defaults for text? I just worked on a newsletter in which I’ve based all its different text elements on Basic Paragraph. The copy is often too short or too long to fit, so all I have to do is tweak the size and leading in Basic Paragraph and all the text elements adjust automatically. (I know this approach is a design no-no in most instances, but it’s a rinky-dink newsletter.) And as long as one document has Basic Paragraph set up the same as another, what’s the problem with copying the text from one to another? In short, WHY, then, does Basic Paragraph even exist?
Basic Paragraph is fine if you’re one man/woman operation and have no intention of ever using the content in another publication.
If you copy to another document that has a different basic paragraph style you may be in for a very unpleasant experience when everything changes on you.
My advice, FWIW, would be to create a new base style for your newsletter and base styles off of that.
By doing that you’re not going to run into the same issues as all of the settings will come through when you copy the text.
Try it yourself. Create a new file. Redefine Basic Paragraph and base the other styles on it.
Now create another new file and copy a block of text from the first file to it and watch what happens to your text.
Fritz,
I fully agree that rules are made to be broken, provided you know the rules that you’re breaking and why you’re breaking them.
In my earlier post, I meant to say Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. (thanks to Jennie for pointing it out)
Do not indent the first paragraph in a story. We know that is the beginning.
Also, when you are designing something that is CMYK and you use black, make sure you choose a black that is 100k, and not registration black. I move the registration swatch to the bottom of my pallette to make sure I don’t select it.
Do not add an apostrophe when trying to make a word plural – just add the “s”! (if applicable.) This means you, car dealers! They are famous for ads that say “SUV’s” when they should put “SUVs”.
Also, learn the difference between “its” and “it’s”. “Its” is possesive, while “it’s” is a contraction to substitute for “it is.”
Emmy, if you’re using black as your background you should have a swatch called Rich Black, containing 20% Cyan, 20% Yellow, 20% Magenta and 100% Black. Reason for this is that Black doesn’t print too well, as it’s not a pure ink, so it needs back up. Although if you are placing a photograph that has a black background, and you want to sit it on black on your InDesign document you should sample your photograph colour black and match a swatch for it in InDesign, it could be 56% cyan 27%yellow 60% magenta and 86% black, you can really see the difference between the black inks on a page.
Dan, your “plural” post made me laugh (in a good way) because of the name of this post: “Do’s and Don’ts” I agree with your rule, but clearly there are exceptions! After all “Dos and Don’ts” may be correct, but InDesign doesn’t run on DOS. ;)
Ha-ha, DB – I didn’t even notice that was the name of the post. Perhaps a compromise could be “DOs & DON’Ts,” although then you’d be shouting at us. Your use of it in this context doesn’t bother me, anyway.
Text boxes are cheap!
I TOTALLY disagree with the comments about doing all formatting using multiple styles and minimal text boxes.
This is InDesigns’ biggest failure – its inability to comprehend that SOME users prefer to set type using their eyes, brain and hands.
We want control! Automation is not control…
Why ‘lock-in’ typographic settings at the early stages of design? I’m sure there are some who would agree that the actual ‘text’ sometimes doesn’t show up until the initial design process is complete. How do you know the actual copy will fit? With that in mind, why are we setting up an automated style? Where is the time-savings when you have to go and edit all your styles?
Also, with InDesign’s factory installed ‘missing font’ feature, you may be setting yourself up for some serious grief, seeing as the missing font bug is connected directly to ID’s character and paragraph styles.
InDesign is NOT doing anyone any favors by insisting that every character in a document deserves a paragraph or character styled applied to it.
What is a basic paragraph style in InDesign anyway? Its the first keystrokes in any given InDesign text box with some sort of ‘time-saving’ code strapped to its butt like an anvil!
People should learn the difference between a single open quote mark and an apostrophe. Both are ?curly?, but the open quote mark is curved like an open parenthesis, and the apostrophe like a close parenthesis. Both are distinct from the foot mark, which is not curved at all. I see tons of mistakes made in the use of these marks. I recently saw a fancy cosmetics display that had a foot mark in one place and a single open quote mark in another place, when an apostrophe was required in both places! The rule is that an apostrophe indicates something left out; for example, the abbreviation for this year is ?07, the apostrophe standing for the 20. The rule for a quote is that it is used with a quote, ?duh?, or ?duh? if you are British. Unfortunately, some online media do not show the characters correctly even when they are typed with the correct keystrokes. I have had to train myself to use a foot mark when sending E-mail, as the recipient may get another character altogether depending on his software. I have used the InDesign keystrokes here. Let?s see if they show up correctly in this comment.
My boss should seriously look at rule #1.
billh
You are right to have your own way of working, and it’s ok to do text boxes for everything if you’re only doing the job once. You don’t particularly need a paragraph style and character style if you’re never going to edit the document again.
But, say you do the whole design for a client. The client comes back to you and says I want all the Level 1 headings to be 2 pts bigger and all the Level 2 headings 2pts smaller. I don’t want my latin phrases to be in italic, I want them to be bold italic. Oh and I’d also like to add the colour green to all my Level 1 headings a drop shadow to all my boxes.
Now, you may disagree with all these changes but it’s what the client wants.
Now you have 200 page magazine, with no paragraph styles, no character styles, no object styles!!! What to do, it would take nearly a day to go through all the text all the headings all the objects and don’t forget, you’re selecting individual boxes, you’re not just pressing the down arrow key to go to the next line.
But by looking at the start of your project and checking how many headings, sub headings, chapters, sections, body text, italics, bold and other instances you need and setting them up, ok granted can take a long time. Perhaps a day, but you can make global changes in seconds through out all your documents.
By not using the paragraph styles and character styles you are limiting your uses of indesig, for example, the table of contents, this feature won’t work without paragraph styles.
Now as I said, it can be pointless to setup paragraph styles and character styles in some instances, in reality it’s a massive time saver.
Do you even know how frustrating it is to get a document to jazz up and it comes in as 120pp with no styles at all. Making changes is a nightmare.
I do 30 publications on taxation books each year, and I have created over 80 paragraph styles, over 35 character styles and now with indesign cs3 i have table styles, object styles, nested styles et al implemented. Do you think I could memorise over 100 styles for 30 publications? I certainly cannot, and that’s a fact. Styles are a God-send and a designers dream.
Global changes in seconds.
Don’t create outlines out of all of your text so you don’t have to send along the font.
Bring back public flogging for people who ignore the styles
I work on the same complex documents described here – and NEVER apply styles, nest styles or embed graphics until there is a very clear picture of what the content is.
Here is why. For example: You are working on a ‘style’ tweak on page two. Now you have to jet to page 72 to visually make sure nothing has fallen off the page or crashed into something else. You spend more time reviewing ‘universal’ changes via scrolling through pages than making the style changes themselves – that happens almost instantly.
I never embed images in text at all.
Our production artists agree, setting up your own styles is one thing, navigating a document littered with pre-applied styles is another. Usually, along with the working file, production artists receive a hard copy with ‘styles’ manually keyed-up, then they apply the styles in ID themselves.
Imagine being the person handed your file with 35 character styles and 80 paragraph styles and trying to figure out what is what, just to make a few quick client requested revisions – I would love to see what a document with 80 paragraph styles actually looks like too. 80 styles?
I do believe it is much faster to format a text box (head, subhead – whatever) manually, then paste plain text over the formatting than it is fussing with the styles.
Did they actually flog designers before for not using style sheets?
my thoughts!
Well when I have a document that has 4 level headings, then that’s 4 styles already. Then level 3 headings the numbers remain Bold and the Heading Text goes to italic, I inserted a nested style so that anything in my Level 3 heading after a tab is italic. Handy, now I don’t have 3,200 pages of text to apply italic to that heading.
Most of the publications I do are between 100 and 3,200 pages. I don’t want to scroll 3,200 pages making changes to individual boxes. That’s pure crazy. All in all I’d say I have about 40,000 pages of text to alter per year. With style changes too. For instance, in one of the books the new legislation is inserted in BOLD, it’s not a fact of selecting all because headings are bold too. So I have a character style for New Legislation that applies just bold. Now I can just search and replace that style with none. Hey Presto no bold and I can begin bolding things again.
When I change a style, because I only have one text box per page out to the measure, and all my pages are linked, the only bit that goes off the bottom is at the end of a document. So now I can just add pages and flow them on. No hassle there, no text lost, no worries.
As well as that I can tell all my Level 1,2,3,4 headings to Keep to the next 2 lines, instead of having to go to each line where I have a heading and pressing CTRL – K 2 for 40,000 pages, probably about 320,000 instances throughout all publications. And that’s just the Headings, then there’s examples which are indented and italics. Case names which are italic. Latin phrases which are italic. I made all new styles for each thing so that if I want I can apply globally and instantly a character format change. All my body text is 10/12, but my examples are 9/10. Tell me your heart wouldn’t break if you did all these things manually.
I let the authors update the files too, I export them to a word file. The average author has Ms Word, and my RTF’s retain their paragraph and character styles. Now I can just import that word file back into the document, mapping the styles of course.
If you had 40,000 pages to change every single year, you would use style sheets. And yes old comps did get flogged, as they too had style sheets, written on paper beside their chases and if it wasn’t followed, they did get a whoppin.
Then don’t even get me started about tagging your pages for distribution on the web. You have to tag your web styles to your paragraph and character styles to get your publication on the web with all elements in tact.
Although I agree that some people dont’ name their styles effectively, giving it a font name and size, but that’s not right. All my styles are named, Body Text, Body Text indented 26 mm, Quotes, Example Head, Example Text 9pt Italic, Case Names, Latin Phrases etc. Anyone can pick up my work and instantly do what’s needed without having to guess.
And yes I have worked on documents where someone uses a colour for a heading, and implement that to the style and then use the colour on something else without a style, change the colour, you change both. I have worked on nightmarish stuff before where when the colours aren’t associated to styles and just used anywhere then things get weird. Same with styles, people bastardising styles without making a new style.
It is not the end or the beginning of the world to use styles for everything. It’s a preference and the way some people work and others don’t. Even two people taught by the same person have different opinions on the way to do it correctly. It’s a preference, a choice and that’s why you’re not forced to use them, but can if you want.
If you read my post you’ll notice I said that styles are not applied until later when content is clear, not that they aren’t used at all.
Why assign a style to a block of lorem ipsum when the real copy hasn’t arrived yet – we don’t even have a word count to go with for initial layouts in most cases.
Eugene, it sounds like you work with real content for the most part at the outset. That is not a universal scenario.
A majority of the work I do in ID is speculative creative development – when real text arrives, the styles are applied and the files are forwarded to production hands, who again have stated they would prefer applying the styles to the document themselves.
Bill, you bring up an interesting point about making changes to styles while tweaking here and there. You’re right that making a tweak to a style definition is a pain because it makes changes throughout a whole document. That’s why I usually reformat a paragraph in one place (locally) until it looks right, and then choose Redefine Style from the paragraph style palette menu (or press Command-Option-R/Ctrl-Alt-R).
Redefine Style is one of my favorite features. (If I remember correctly, I think Amy Rothstein did a redefine style xtension for QX a long time ago that was a “must-have” add-on.)
Lets not get mixed up with Design stage and artwork stages!
My strong view was in the light of a recent job I had to amend (an English – Russian dictionary) and all the styles were there but not applied, I wasn’t happy, praise be the eyedropper tool.
Bill H, I hear you. It reminds of an incident a couple years ago when I was teaching InDesign to a group of art directors at a magazine. We were formatting text and I was showing them how leading was a character format, not a paragraph format as in QXP (which they were moving from).
I thought what I was saying was totally innocuous, but one of the guys apparently couldn’t take it any more and burst out, “Oh for God’s sake, just show us the keyboard shortcut and move on!” LOL … it turns out that though these eight guys did the initial layout design of feature spreads (award-winning spread designs, btw), after a sign-off from the CD, it went to production, where those people created and applied styles to keep things consistent. The ADs didn’t want to be bothered by technicalities.
I got the point and moved on …. the production group was the next scheduled training, anyway. But coming from the perspective of a careful designer, it was almost painful teaching users how to lay out pages and blocks of text without also teaching how to do that in the most efficient, production and pre-press-aware manner.
It’s just a different workflow, one often used by ad agencies, too.
Bill,
I have to disagree with your use of multiple text boxes. Nothing is more of a pain than receiving someone else’s file with 30 boxes on one page to edit and having to select through a ton of boxes to find the right box to edit. Just use one and format the text to look the way you want. Much cleaner and easier.
David B,
the incorrect use of character styles might indeed stem from the way things work in QuarkXPress.
If I remember correctly, paragraph styles in QXP *do not* contain any character style information, but every paragraph style is linked to a character style and by default uses that to format its text, nicely separating the roles of paragraph and character styles.
I actually like this approach better and InDesign’s way of doing it confused me too in the beginning. As Anne-Marie said in podcast 54, it should really be called “Paragraph and Character Styles”.
Martin, it’s not as rosy as you remember it. ;-)
In QXP a Paragraph Style’s dialog box has a dropdown menu for Character Style. The default choice here is “Default” (in other words, not a character style).
The vast majority of QXP users, in my experience, spec character settings in Paragraph styles by clicking the Edit button next to that “Default” and then make character formatting choices there. So the paragraph style sheet does include character formatting in QXP.
Alternatively, you can create a Character Style, and then choose the name of that style sheet from the dropdown menu in the Paragraph Styles dialog. There’s little point to this though … as users quickly figure out … if you need to create a different Character Style for every Paragraph Style. Why not just modify the Paragraph Style’s “Default” text formatting setting instead, it’s a lot less work.
So the only time users create Character Styles for use in a Paragraph Style is if they’re going to base multiple Paragraph Styles on a single Character Style. I’ve seen a few users/companies work this way, and it’s something I’ve wished we could do in ID once in awhile.
But even that could turn out to be trouble, especially if you’re tweaking the design as you go. Say you based 5 or 6 “main content” paragraph styles on the same character style. Now you realize you should have chosen a different font color or a smaller size for one of Paragraph Styles.
You can’t just edit the type specs for that one Paragraph Style, because choosing “Edit” next to the name of your Character Style would change the Character Style itself, of course … all the other Paragraph Styles will update to show the smaller text size or different color.
So, you either have to create a new Character Style for it, or choose Default (which zeroes out all the specs from the Character style, gah! QXP needs a “break link to style” button here) and then manually edit the Default settings, back to square one.
Perhaps.. DON’T delete your document unless you have backup.
My fellow Americans, please, please stop changing common expessions to the opposite of their originally intended meanings!
It’s based IN, not “based outta.”
And based ON, not “based off.”
You really couldN’T care less, (if you don’t care at all), and don’t tell me you live outside of Chicago. So do I, and I’m in Pennsylvania!
One detail I constantly observe: many designers do not heed the correct punctuation when using lists. When to use a . ; or nothing. Also when to follow with a capital letter and when not to. (especially when there are 2 or 3 levels).
G
-Peter,
“Use bullets and numbering, do not insert bullets or number things manually.”
Yeah, I do it correctly now. It took me a while to see the button or set the paragraph style for that.
“Do not manually adust tracking (or even kerning) to copyfit a story?
and
“Do not add a big black drop shadow to black 10pt body copy (or use a white drop shadow to make text ?readable? because you placed it on top of a really contrasty image)”
Both of these are not up to our designers. If the writers don’t want to write more or less to fix it, they aren’t going to. The same goes for Marketing folks who picked a photo and cropping I wouldn’t have chosen.
-Grant, whereas I agree with you, when an editorial staff decides to use AP style or makes up a company style, we have to follow it. Unfortunately, Marketing doesnt, who we also work with. There are so many copy/text ‘rules’ at my co., it would make your head spin, especially the ones that contradict each other. I know it does to the Copy Editor. ;)
I’m sorry but I have to disagree with the ALL CAPS style. I have seen where someone has used that and it messes up the character space when you export to pdfx but when you print (with distiller) all is fine. This happens with different fonts, not just a particular one. I guess what I’m saying is, use it but BE CAREFUL and check the type that uses any kind of style when you export.
You guys make me laugh. I have banned much pre-formatting from those who write what I must format! I love all of you! I am pro-para and character styles and I absolutely cannot stand guides all over the page (i know a fellow designer who has upwards of 20 guides ahowing–scurry). I am ANTI-CAPS period LOL. I ahve suffered the consequences of not embedding a graphic amongst changing text. However, I am guilty of using Basic Paragraph and have suffered the consequences. Live and learn…
Hey Dave,
You may have answered this before on this site, but I’ve been searching through some of the categories but to avail…
Q: I’m working in CS3, clients’ are in CS2. When I send them an INX file, only the text file is visible and unlocked, the images and background layers are locked and turned off. The text wrap remains the same before I send. The problem is when they open it on their end, and I recieve it back… the text wrap goes nuts, and text over-sets itself. It seems it happens for objects that have Wrap to Edges or Alpha Channels as oppose to Wrap to Frame. Is there a compatibility issue when it comes to text wrapping? And how could we avoid this again? (other than to have the client edit text in a RTF file). Cheers.
David Blatner said, “Don?t type one or more empty paragraph returns between paragraphs to make space. If you want to make space, use Space Before or Space After, or use Keep With. That?s what those features are there for.”
When I copy text from Adobe Reader 7 files, it doesn’t know the difference between line breaks and paragraph breaks in the original file. Is there any way of coding an InDesign file to maintain this distinction when output to PDF? I would think that putting an empty paragraph between “real” paragraphs would do this, perhaps using a special format so that the spacing comes out right (or maybe even allowing zero extra spacing if desired). Is there a better solution?
Prozacgrrl: Sorry I didn’t see this earlier. I don’t have any good answers for you, though; you shouldn’t see this kind of change via INX.
Shmuel: No, there’s really not much you can do there. Once something is turned into PDF, it loses a lot of its “structure.” One exception is if you turn on the Use Tags feature in the export pdf dialog box. Another option is to use Recosoft’s PDF2ID tool, which uses some sophisticated analysis to figure out what’s a paragraph, etc.
Thanks, David. Once I get my working copy of InDesign CS3 (30-day trial version has expired), I will play around with this some more, as I believe it is important to preserve as much as possible in the PDF, which usually gets a lot more distribution than original layout files.
PS. I really made (and make) great use of Real Word QuarkXPress 6 and have started reading my way through Real World InDesign CS3.
Could anyone help me with a form in InDesign? Working on a entry form and the rules (where people write) are stumping me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks – Mike
Mike, this post (actually, it’s a series of 6 posts) might help.
Newbie Here
Peter wrote: ?Do not manually adust tracking (or even kerning) to copyfit a story and say ?Hey, nobody?s gonna notice?? ?
How am I meant to get copy to fit without adjusting tracking?
I’m “typesetting” various bits of texts I’ve copied and pasted from the internet into my fake magazine page layouts. Every bit of text I deal with needs tracking here and there to make it “bottom out”/fit the available space.
What do the Pros do to make text fit a given space if they’re not tracking?
Reading a novel in the garden the other day, I noticed one of the paragraphs om a page had been set with slightly larger word spacing to keep the text justified
– I didn’t mind and very much doubt any non-designer/type person would even have noticed but is this unprofessional?
Wow, lots to read here, and I have to admit *hangs head in shame* I haven’t had any education in this field and thus do what I think looks good and works well.
I’m crazy about using layers — every file I make has at least 3 of them, for the background, images and text — and set character, paragraph, cell and table styles where and when I can. But rules… they’re for weaklings (I kid, I kid). I just wing it :D
Deano: I’m going to have to agree with you on this one — adjusting kerning and tracking is a time-honored method for copyfitting. The problem is that in ID (especially with paragraph composition), it doesn’t always work the way you expect. See my comment above about the TypeFitter plug-in.
Where can I get these rules as a poster, so I can tack them above every designer’s workspace?
Seriously, though, about the multiple box thing…
Once had a designer that used separate boxes for every element of a price pop in a catalog (one for the $, another for the dollar amount, another for the cents, yet another for the decimal!) so she could scale and style each one independently. (truth be told, she was a much better typesetter than I could ever hope to be.) OK, worked for her styling, but I was then tasked with making a style library out of them – one that could be applied to running type. Imagine all the kerning, tracking, baseline shifting – not to mention different font weights! – and putting all of that into a style sheet so someone else could apply it quickly.
right now I get designers who use a combination of subheds inline with running text as well as outside in their own frames, all on the same page. Invariably, someone says, “hey, this space doesn’t match that space – why?”
and yes, lists – use them. We just did a story with 125 products, numbered. Getting the formatting right was tricky (numbered product name, then description, then nutritional info were all separate ‘graphs, different sizes and leading, which I had to make into one to get the numbering to work) but there was no way I was going to number 125 items across 10 pages manually, then renumber them when the order changed. The designer balked (mainly because she likes to soft-return down the side of a column (!) to get better rags, and those were my nested style delimiters) but it worked in the end.
(and I now have one more reason to add to my growing list of why I need CS3 now – replacing the tab in the list with an em-space – thanks Anne-Marie)
now if I could only add “thou shalt not use soft-returns in running type” to the list of floggable offenses – that and all of the type set to “body copy”, no matter how it’s styled, styled with character styles, then locally formatted.
“Don?t type in ALL CAPS! If you really need something to be in capital letters, apply the All Caps style to that text (so you can turn it off later when you come to your senses).”
This seems obvious, but I bet 90% of people just type in all caps, which looks terrible in 90% of cases.
Help!!
Does anyone know how to convert registration black to true black in a pdf?
I think you can convert Registration Black to normal Black in Acrobat 9, can’t you? In the new Convert Colors dialog box? I haven’t tried it, but I thought I remember seeing it.
what about hanging punctuation?
no one seemed to mention this.
that is a must
hanging punctuation is recommended for body text mainly, and never for tables where tabular lining figures work best
and here’s another one: never have columns longer than 60-70 characters including spaces, since they become difficult to read
[…] and how they are used in typography. From a video (Rebecca Bilbrey) and a few webpages (PeachPit, InDesignSecets) I finally understand what hard and soft returns are and how they are useful in the design world as […]